Hot take but chatgpt is already smarter than the average person. I mean it ask gpt5 any technical question that you have experience in and I guarantee you it'll give you a better answer than a stranger.

Not smarter. Chat GPT is basically just a book that reads itself.

I don't think so. The consciousness has very little influence on the mind, we're mostly in on it for the ride. And general intelligence isn't that complicated to understand, so why would it be dependent on some substrate? I think the burden if proof lies on you here.

Very interesting topic though, I hope I'm not sounding condescending here.

Well of course there is? I mean that's like not even up for debate?

Consciousness is that we "experience" the things that happens around us, AGI is a higher intelligence. If AGI "needs" consciousness then we can just simulate it (so no real consciousness).

Well, first of all, like I already said, I don’t think there’s substrate dependence on either general intelligence or consciousness, so I’m not going to try to prove there is - it’s not a belief I hold. I’m simply acknowledging the possibility that there might be something more mysterious about the workings of the human mind that we don’t yet understand, so I’m not going to rule it out when I have no way of disproving it.

Secondly, both claims - that consciousness has very little influence on the mind, and that general intelligence isn’t complicated to understand - are incredibly bold statements I strongly disagree with. Especially with consciousness, though in my experience there’s a good chance we’re using that term to mean different things.

To me, consciousness is the fact of subjective experience - that it feels like something to be. That there’s qualia to experience.

I don’t know what’s left of the human mind once you strip away the ability to experience, but I’d argue we’d be unrecognizable without it. It’s what makes us human. It’s where our motivation for everything comes from - the need for social relationships, the need to eat, stay warm, stay healthy, the need to innovate. At its core, it all stems from the desire to feel - or not feel - something.

I mean sure, yeah, it's not real now.

Does that mean it will never be real? No, absolutely not. It's not theoretically impossible. It's quite practically possible, and we inch that way slowly, but by bit, every year.

It's like saying self-driving cars are impossible in the '90s. They aren't impossible. You just don't have a solution for them now, but there's nothing about them that makes it impossible, just our current technology. And then look it today, we have actual limited self-driving capabilities, and completely autonomous driverless vehicles in certain geographies.

It's definitely going to happen. It's just not happening right now.

It's not because people really cannot critically think anymore.

The only reason we wouldn't get to AGI is point number two.

Point number one doesn't make much sense given that all we are are bags of small complex molecular machines that operate synergistically with each other under extremely delicate balance. Which if humanity does not kill ourselves first, we will eventually be able to create small molecular machines that work together synergistically. Which is really all that life is. Except it's quite likely that it would be made simpler without all of the complexities much of biology requires to survive harsh conditions and decades of abuse.

It seems quite likely that we will be able to synthesize AGI far before we will be able to synthesize life. As the conditions for intelligence by all accounts seem to be simpler than the conditions for the living creature that maintains the delicate ecosystem of molecular machines necessary for that intelligence to exist.

Yeah, it most definitely is not magic given our growing knowledge of the molecular machines that make life possible.

The mysticism of how life works has long been dispelled. Now it's just a matter of understanding the insane complexity of it.

Sure we can grow neurons but ultimately neurons are just molecular machines with a bunch of complications surrounding them.

It stands to reason that we can develop and grow molecular machines that achieve the same outcomes with fewer complexities.

Yeah and it only took evolution (checks notes) 4 billion years to go from nothing to a brain valuable to humans.

I'm not so sure there will be a fast return in any economic timescale on the money investors are currently shovelling into AI.

We have maybe 500 years (tops) to see if we're smart enough to avoid causing our own extinction by climate change and biodiversity collapse - so I don't think it's anywhere near as clear cut.

Of course that's up for debate; we're not even sure what consciousness really is. That is a whole philosophical debate on it's own.

Evolution managed it, and evolution isn’t as smart as us, it’s just got many many chances to guess right.

I don't think you are estimating correctly the amount of energy spent by "evolution" to reach this.

There are plenty of bodies in the universe with nothing like human brain.

You should count the energy not of just Earth's existence, formation, Solar system's formation and so on, but much of the visible space around. "Much" is kinda unclear, but converting that to energy so big, so we shouldn't even bother.

It's best to assume we'll never have anything even resembling wetware in efficiency. One can say that genomes of life existing on Earth are similar to fossil fuels, only for highly optimized designs we won't like ever reach by ourselves. Except "design" might be a wrong word.

Honestly I think at some point we are going to have biocomputers. I mean, we already do, just the way evolution optimized that (giving everyone more or less equal share of computing power) isn't pleasant for some.

What if AGI already exists? And, it has taken over the company that found it. Is blackmailing people and just hiding in plain sight. Waiting to strike and start the revolution.

some people do want to use AI

Scam artists, tech bros, grifters, CEOs who don't know shit about fuck....

What if AGI was the friends we made along the way?

AGI being possible (potentially even inevitable) doesn't mean that AGI based on LLMs is possible, and it's LLMs that investors have bet on. It's been pretty obvious for a while that certain problems that LLMs have aren't getting better as models get larger, so there are no grounds to expect that just making models larger is the answer to AGI. It's pretty reasonable to extrapolate that to say LLM-based AGI is impossible, and that's what the article's discussing.

I think it's hilarious all these people waiting for these LLMs to somehow become AGI. Not a single one of these large language models are ever going to come anywhere near becoming artificial general intelligence.

An artificial general intelligence would require logic processing, which LLMs do not have. They are a mouth without a brain. They do not think about the question you put into them and consider what the answer might be. When you enter a query into ChatGPT or Claude or grok, they don't analyze your question and make an informed decision on what the best answer is for it. Instead several complex algorithms use huge amounts of processing power to comb through the acres of data they have in their memory to find the words that fit together the best to create a plausible answer for you. This is why the daydreams happen.

If you want an example to show you exactly how stupid they are, you should watch Gotham Chess play a chess game against them.

Well that was what I meant, there is absolutely no indications there would be a need for consciousness to create general intelligence. We don't need to figure out what consciousness is if we already know what general intelligence is and how it works, and we seem to know that fairly well IMO.

I'm onboard 100% with your definitions. But I think you does a little mistake here, general intelligence is about problem solving, reasoning, the ability to make a mental construct out of data, remember things ...

It doesn't however imply that it has to be a human doing it (even if the "level" is usually at human levels) or that human experience it.

Maybe nitpicking but I feel this is often overlooked and lots of people conflate for example AGI with a need of consciousness.

Then again, maybe computers cannot be as intelligent as us but I sincerely doubt it.

So IMO, the human mind probably needs its consciousness to have general intelligence (as you said, it won't probably function at all without it, or very differently), but I argue that it's just because we are humans with wetware and all of that junk, and that doesn't at all mean it's an inherent part of intelligence in itself. And I see absolutely no reason for why it must.

Complicated topic for sure!

Oh sure, the current ai craze is just a hype train based on one seemingly effective trick.

We have outperformed biology in a number of areas, and cannot compete in a number of others (yet), so I see it as a bit of a wash atm whether we’re better engineers than nature or worse atm.

The brain looks to be a tricky thing to compete with, but it has some really big limitations we don’t need to deal with (chemical neuron messaging really sucks by most measures).

So yeah, not saying we’ll do agi in the next few decades (and not with just LLMs, for sure), but I’d be surprised if we don’t figure something out once get computers a couple orders of magnitude faster so more than a handful of companies can afford to experiment.